The Book Club

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by author Matthew Sweet to discuss his new biography, The Great Dictator, about the bestselling novelist Barbara Cartland.

They explore the extraordinary life behind Barbara Cartland’s instantly recognisable image – from her beginnings in the aftermath of the First World War to her career as one of the bestselling authors of all time.

They discuss why Ca...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to discuss his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…

Pinker explores the powerful idea of ‘common knowledge’ - not simply what we know, but what we know that other people know, and what we know they know we know.

From the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes to revolutions, financial markets and ...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by philosopher John Sellars to discuss his new book, Stoicism Is Not What You Think.

Sellars explores the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and challenges some of its most common misconceptions – from the idea that Stoics repress their emotions to the belief that they are cold, indifferent and detached from the world.

From its origins in ancient Athens to its modern reviv...

In this week's Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by The New Yorker writer Anand Gopal, whose new book, long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize, is Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution.

What does freedom mean once the dictator has gone? Anand explains why he spent eight years reporting on Manbij, a city of 150,000 that pushed out the Assad regime and set about building a democracy from scratch – and how the a...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by bestselling novelist Hannah Richell to discuss her new memoir, An Ocean and a Day.

When Hannah’s husband died in a surfing accident, her life in Australia was shattered. Suddenly, she was a single mother to two young children, navigating a grief she could never have imagined. Her memoir traces that journey from the moment of the accident, but, more uniquel...

In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by The Times columnist James Marriott, whose new book is The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-literate Society.

Are we witnessing the end of the reading age? James explains why literacy has shaped not just our culture but the way we think – and why its decline could have profound consequences for politics, democracy and public life. They discus...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of a number of fantastic books, including The Cauldron, which released this week. Simon and I talk about the making of the modern middle east, and how we forget some of the most fundamental groups who shaped this part of the world into the region that we know of today.

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This week marks the 160th anniversary of Beatrix Potter’s birth. In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by Penny Bradshaw, author of An A–Z of Beatrix Potter, and the historian and biographer Kathryn Hughes, whose books include Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World, George Eliot and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton.

We plunge into the Potterverse. Does Potter get her ...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Tim Whitmarsh, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and author of Rome’s Age of Revolution: Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity. He tells me why, contrary to what we may have learnt at Sunday school, early Christianity flourished not despite the Roman empire, but because of it.

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My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the novelist Dave Eggers, talking about his new book Contrapposto. Dave tells me why, after years of writing tech-saturated satire, he returned to the world of art; how a novel 20 years in the making became a love story about talent, ambition and the mystery of making beauty; and why he thinks art ends when theory begins.

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My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, talking about his new book All We Say: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches. Ben tells me why a debate between two visions of what makes the US special has been playing out since the nation's conception, what Frederick Douglass has to say to the America of the 21st century, and why Ben Franklin didn't think the constitution was sacred.&n...

In this week's Book Club podcast, I'm joined by the theoretical physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli to discuss his new book 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist's Argument Against Rearmament, where in imitation of Einstein and Bertrand Russell, he uses his platform as a public intellectual to speak against the logic of nuclear escalation. He tells me what the Nazis got right and the US got wrong in the later years of the Second World...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is the Children’s Laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, whose new book, A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now, describes what he discovered from the travels he undertook during his work with BookTrust and the Laureateship.

He tells me what he learned about what really happens when a parent reads to a child, why the crisis in childhood reading is down to much more than the rise...

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Andrea Wulf, talking about her fascinating new book, The Traveller: George Forster and the Search for Humanity. Andrea tells me about the now-forgotten adventurer who sailed with Captain Cook, toured Europe as an intellectual celebrity and sparred with Kant and Rousseau over race and human civilisation – before throwing his lot in with the French Revolution.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Emily Wilson, the scholar and translator of Homer and Seneca, among many others. She tells me what tech bros get wrong about the classical world and what Cardi B can teach us about Aristophanes, as we discuss her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Siri Hustvedt, talking about her new book, Ghost Stories, a memoir of her long and loving marriage to the novelist Paul Auster, and of his death from cancer. Siri tells me why this book ‘needed’ to be written, what their relationship was like, how ‘horrible things’ came to this literary golden couple, and how she explains the experience of being visited, thr...

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Edmund Richardson, author of a new biography of Alexander the Great called Alexander: God, King, Man. Edmund tells me why there is still a fresh story to tell about this most storied of historical figures, why his empire collapsed as soon as it came into being yet nevertheless changed history – and how Alexander conquered the world by mistake.

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My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Jeffrey Winters, whose new book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies makes the case that democracy as it functions now isn’t, as many of us imagine, the only thing keeping the robber barons in check – it is, in fact, the very system that has enabled them to thrive. He tells me how the wealth gap in the US is now many multiples of that in ancient Rome, ...

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep her poetic partnership with Ted Hughes ran.

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